I thought the following should also deserve an honourable mention.

These guys are deep, really deep

Charles Boffard recounts the adventures of Peter Edwards' record-breaking dive
that so nearly ended in disaster.

The preceding week's work-up dives were done in excellent conditions. The sea
turned rougher on Saturday, when the shotline snagged on the bottom and took
the decompression ladder down with it, floats and all. And Saturday's
one-and-a-half to two-metre swells were still out there, with a wind working
itself up and a cyclone system due down from Mozambique in the late afternoon.
"The sea's big out there," said an NSRI old salt, but the skippers - all
experienced locals - were willing to go out and take a look. The team had
planned a window of two days for the big dive: Sunday or Monday. Now, with
worse weather coming in, it was Sunday or nothing. 
"We'll be racing against time and the elements," Capasso announced
dramatically, while Edwards quietly checked the gear. Once he went down,
everyone was committed to a two-hour operation, or five hours if something went
wrong and a deep diver required in-water recompression. 

After the rough 16km ride to deep water, the decision makers looked at the sea
and the sky and conferred. "This is gonna be bad," said skipper Greg Pearson.
Capasso and the surface marshal, his partner Lesley Haenel, agreed. "We wanted
to call it off," says Haenel, "but Edwards was adamant he was going to do it."
Edwards' two deep-tender divers said they'd do it with him. Suddenly the team
was split. The skipper's reservations and the surface mar-shal's veto power
were ineffectual; Edwards was doing his dive. 
Originally, Capasso was to partner him all the way down, but he'd been unable
to complete the required work-up dives. The modified dive plan was this:
Edwards would aim for around 200m, with two or three minutes' bottom time at
his maximum depth. Dudley Powell and Tommy Spoelstra were to accompany Edwards
to around 110. Capasso was to dive to 150, then ascend and wait at 66 with
spare air. Other tender divers would time their entry to meet them at various
points on the ascent to monitor and tend to them during decompression. 

It didn't happen that way. 

Capasso, who'd apparently had a virus earlier in the week, became seasick and
couldn't dive. From 110m, Edwards would now descend alone. Then Henk Briel, due
to go to 66m, was seasick underwater and had to surface and abort his dive
seconds after going in. So Edwards was on his way down with two tenders less
than planned. Descending into a sea with some surprises of its own. 
"Conditions were rough," Edwards acknow-ledges. "There was quite a big swell
running, with a north-east chop and a 15- to 20-knot wind. It was uncomfortable
on the surface, and we had opposing currents: a very strong undercurrent was
running at about four knots, in the opposite direction to the surface current.
I've seen anchor lines snap in that kind of situation." 

Undeterred, Edwards backflipped into the sea. "When I descended through 40m, I
noticed I was running late, and I asked Dudley to put his knees on my cylinder
to push me down faster. I went through 100m in eight to nine minutes, way
behind schedule because of the current and the consequent curve in the line.
Where I left Dudley at 110m, the line actually dragged out horizontally. 
"I dumped all the air from my BC and from the drysuit to drag the line down
with me, but I thought I'd be very lucky to get to 200 on this one. My Cochrane
computer - the only one with a backlit screen - imploded at about 140. It was
getting too dark to read my other computer clearly, but I could just make it
out by the fluorescent glow from my watch. 

"We were just over the continental shelf, against the cliff where it drops from
130 down to about 1 000m. The angle is very steep there, and that creates a
slight downdraft current." Like clouds cascading over Table Mountain. 
If you've dived around rock pinnacles in a current, you'll know the turbulence
can spin you around. At 20m, it's fun. Down there where the sun don't shine,
it's deadly. 

"By the time I got to 170 or so, I could feel it pulling downwards," Edwards
continues. "That's what made the dive so treacherous. If I'd let go of my line,
I'd have been carried away. I'd have been able to inflate out of the
down-draft, but I couldn't have got back to the line. 
"When I got down to five metres from the end of the 300m shotline, I could just
make out that my depth read 170-something. Elapsed time was 13 minutes, three
behind schedule; but the delay was at a shallow depth, so I wasn't too
perturbed about it, and I had the planned bottom time to buffer me. I looked at
the line's angle, and thought it was pointless going that last five metres. I'd
only gain about a metre of depth. That's when I turned around, and the dive
really became difficult." 
Then there was another decision to make: to spend the planned time at the
bottom, or start moving up immediately. "I spent a minute or two there, but
when I started to move up the line, because of its angle I actually remained at
175m for another four-and-a-half minutes. 

"I couldn't ascend. Because of the angle of the line I had to pull myself along
it for the first 100m or so." 
That 100m pull raised him to only 155m depth. "I knew I had to get out of there
quickly, so I inflated my BC and lifted the entire line with me to 100m. The
line made a big J-loop from the surface to me, and I pulled myself in to Dudley
from the side, covering about another 100m. By then, elapsed time was 24
minutes. 
"I extended the deep deco stops to make up for the extra bottom time and the
exertion. I had various decompression schedules slated down, and to be safe I
worked on the schedule for 190m. I told Dudley that I was very tired - working
at that depth is almost suicidal - and he shackled in behind me for the ascent.
"We started ascending on the line. Our first stop at 100m was two minutes, then
three minutes at 87 on a different trimix gas; stops at 75, 70, 65, 60, and
from there every three metres. They increased in duration until the final
three-metre stop of over an hour." 

At around 75m, Powell became snagged in the line when a big surface swell
caused it to loop around one of his cylinders. "I had to remove and reattach
his first stage to get him untangled," Edwards recounts, "but there was no
drama. We continued up, and at 55 the tenders checked that we were all okay.
They brought down a spare cylinder of air - some-one on the surface thought I
was out of air, which I wasn't. Our deco gases were hanging on the ladder,
which was moving a bit with the swell. To spend an hour-and-a-half on it going
up and down was going to be a drag, so I clipped myself to it by a line and
made myself neutrally buoyant. It was a rough sea, but as long as you're
neutrally buoyant, I've never really had a hassle with a three-metre stop." 

Total dive time was two hours and five minutes. 

"After my physical exertion, I was pretty impressed that we didn't have any
symptoms after the dive. That was the one thing that worried me during the deco
stops: whether there would be any repercussions. 
"I was behind schedule down there, and that's why I stopped where I did. If I
hadn't been late, I would have gone to the end of the line and hung on there to
drag it down to 200 or 220. But given the current and the fact that I was
behind schedule, I wasn't going to try to pull it any deeper. Had conditions
been as good as they were two days before, there's no doubt in my mind that I
would have got to 250." 

There it is. From 175m under the sea, a story of courage, skill and
self-reliance, told with the same quiet self-control that accomplished the
dive. Maybe that's why they call it The Silent World. On the surface, however,
it was damn near pandemonium as Lesley Haenel coped with a shortage of gas and
divers. 

When the two deep tenders weren't back on the deco ladder when they were due,
Haenel realised they'd stayed down with Edwards. That meant they'd need to
decompress for longer, and she felt she didn't have enough oxygen-rich deco gas
hanging on the ladder down there for all three divers. And the over-stretched
tender divers now had three potential problems instead of one. 

Worse was to come. 

During decompression, the big 50l oxygen tank on the deco ladder blew its valve
coupling, sending thousands of litres of compressed oxygen streaming uselessly
to the surface. Now there were three divers in the water with an oxygen
requirement, and no pure oxygen. 
Disaster was averted, according to Capasso and Haenel, by two lucky breaks. 

Break one: The previous evening, while Capasso was filling tanks, he noticed
three extra ten-litre cylinders near him, with shackles for attachment to the
deco ladder hanging invitingly from their necks. "What the hell," he thought,
and filled them with an 80 percent oxygen mixture. 

Break two: Capasso and Henk Briel did not dive. The two tanks of 80-percent
oxygen mixture they would have used themselves were thus available to be sent
down to the three deep-divers. 
"Without that extra gas," emphasises Haenel, "we would have needed an airlift."
Possibly, or definitely? "Definitely." 
"Definitely not," says Edwards, who main-tains that he and Dudley Powell had
enough gas. He doesn't see what the fuss was about. 
Either way, getting those extra tanks down to the decompressing divers had the
surface marshal and a skipper in the water, where they weren't supposed to be.
Haenel, without fins, swam tanks over to the ladder. Skipper Greg Pearson,
still recovering from a broken neck, risked his health to act as a tender
diver. 

Why was this happening? 

By their own safety standards, the dive should have been called off three
times: when it was decided that Capasso couldn't accompany Edwards all the way
down; when the surface marshal and the skipper weren't happy with the weather;
when two tender divers became too sick to dive. 

Edwards obviously felt, correctly, that he was the most experienced, capable
person there. So he made his own decisions. Perhaps if the surface marshal had
been a grizzled old trimix diver, he would have carried enough authority to
convince Edwards otherwise. 
The old-salt NSRI skipper had checked the weather with port captains north and
south, and told Edwards that it would hold until 5pm. The best-qualified person
made that decision, Edwards maintains, "...with me having the last say." 
Edwards knew he was capable of doing the dive alone. At that depth, he says,
you're a solo diver even if you have a partner. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Fjelsten [mailto:fjelsten@ma*.st*.dk*]
Sent: Monday, 16 August 1999 2:25 AM
To: Techdiver mailing list
Subject: Darwin Award winner???


You gentlemen will, no doubt, enjoy this!

http://www.underwaternews.net/deepair8aug99.htm

Episodes like this makes you wonder if the term 'Homo _Sapiens_' is not a 
maloproprism.

://Peter Fjelsten
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